Education, From The Capitol To The Classroom

Stories about students: How does education policy affect the way students learn and grow? Can schools meet their needs as they balance ramped-up testing with personal changes and busy schedules? And are students who need help getting it?

Stories about educators: How are those responsible for implementing education policy in schools − from classroom teachers, to district administrators, to school board members − affected by changes at the top? And how well do they meet their challenge of reaching students with varying abilities and needs?

Stories about school assessment: With an increased push for 'accountability' in schools, what can test scores tell us about teacher effectiveness and student learning − and what can't they tell us? What does the data say about how schools at all levels are performing?

Stories about government influence: Who are the people and groups most instrumental in crafting education policy? What are their priorities and agendas? And how do they work together when they disagree?

Stories about money: How do local, state, and federal governments pay to support the education policies they craft? How do direct costs of going to school − from textbooks to tuition − hit a parent or student's bottom line? And how do changing budgets and funding formulas affect learning and teaching?

How New Academic Standards Will Affect Indiana Schools

April 18, 2012 | 2:54 PM

A teacher at East Side Intermediate School in Anderson instructs students about patterns.

For the first time this year, state officials are asking Indiana kindergarteners to meet the same academic standards as kindergartners across much of the nation, from Hawaii to Kentucky.

That’s because this year Indiana’s kindergartens are implementing the Common Core, a set of academic standards now adopted by 45 states. By 2014, all Hoosier students will be held to the nationally-crafted set of standards.

The Common Core could have broad impact on Indiana schools. The standards will bring new — and, state officials say, more rigorous — statewide tests to Indiana by 2015, meaning the Common Core could affect everything from the state’s letter grading system for schools to its fledgling teacher evaluation program.

Leveling The Playing Field

The National Governors Association — primarily responsible, along with the Council of Chief State School Officers, for drafting the new standards — says the 45 states who’ve adopted the Common Core, in whole or in part, have done so voluntarily.

Still, the scale of the new standards’ implementation is unprecedented. Since the late 1980s, education officials in each individual state have been setting their own academic standards for their students.

“We could have the best standards in the world — define best how ever you want — but if those tests don’t meet the level of excitement people have for them, then the standards don’t matter at all.”—Jonathan Plucker, IU’s Center for Evaluation and Education Policy

But this has allowed vast disparities in the quality of different states’ standards to develop, says Jonathan Plucker, director of IU’s Center for Evaluation and Education Policy.

Plucker says Indiana had relatively good state-level standards to begin with. But nationally, some states set relatively low standards, which creates an illusion of high academic performance that makes comparing states difficult.

“The playing field is so un-level that you can’t even really play on it,” Plucker says.

Ryan Reyna is an education program director for the National Governor’s Association, one of the national groups behind the Common Core. He says the problem with some states’ standards is that students were asked to know about a lot of subjects, but not to know those subjects well. With the Common Core, Reyna says that will change.

“You will be seeing certain grades, certain progressions where there’s more time spent on areas and ideas that are critical— are foundation points moving them through school and into college and careers,” Reyna says.

One example of a “foundational skill” emphasized in the new standards: The Common Core says all third graders should know their multiplication tables by heart before moving to fourth grade. That’s tougher than Indiana’s current third grade standard, which requires third graders to know how to count by 2’s and 5’s and 10’s.

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Perhaps Elwood Elementary School, in the small town northwest of Muncie, provides a foretaste of how the Common Core will affect schools.

By order of their principal, Bev Groover, every Elwood third grader has to know her multiplication tables by Spring Break. (Groover herself leads the third graders in Multiplication Boot Camp every day after school.)

Groover knows she’s raising the bar for her students, but she says almost all of the nearly 130 third graders at Elwood Elementary have been up to the challenge so far.

Are Standards The Answer?

If the Common Core standards are to make a difference for students, education policy analysts say schools will need to have access to the right curricular materials and professional development.

“Just saying that kids need to know their multiplication tables at the end of grade three doesn’t mean that teachers know how to teach them that stuff. Or that they’ve got good instructional materials that’s got that content in there,” says Russ Whitehurst, director of the Brown Center on Education Policy at the Brookings Institution.

Plucker agrees. He says the Common Core is a great idea in principle — even though Indiana’s standards are pretty rigorous anyway — but is withholding judgment until statewide tests based on the new national standards replace the ISTEP in 2015.

“We could have the best standards in the world — define best how ever you want — but if those tests don’t meet the level of excitement people have for them, then the standards don’t matter at all,” Plucker says.

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Comments

Cindipastore

I find it interesting that our local school board just voted to implement a pre-school. why? according to the local newpaper article it’s to get them ready for Kindergarten because Kindergarten is now more like first grade. i believe they are implying that many kids aren’t ready for that. well, you know what? it could be because they are NOT supposed to be ready for first grade yet. it could be that it’s not developmentally appropriate. Finland, the highest ranked in education country in the world doesn’t begin formal reading instruction until kids are 7. shouldn’t that tell us something?

kystokes

It’s an interesting point, Cindi. Good to hear from you, hope you’re well! The principal I profile in this story had something to say on the “first-grade-ification” of Grade K / the pushing down of important skills to curriculums for earlier grades. Maybe I’ll include that in a later post on this subject.

http://www.facebook.com/anthony.straine Anthony Straine

Childern will often surprise their parents with the amount of information they are prepared for. The issue is that parents usually drop the ball due to other pressing problems: bills, work, family stress, etc to teach their kids the basic like basic reading, adding, subtracting. Most kids can learn this stuff before first grade and should be expected to know it. Counting by 2s, 5s, and 10s was something that I learned in second grade and, had it not been for a late state due to eye sight issues, were expected to read novels like “Where the Redfern Grows” by 3rd grade. Point is, America on the whole isn’t putting enough faith in their childern’s learning ability and it shows by the time most kids, especially in the inner cities, go to High School. At the same time, we expect people to spend nearly 1/4 of their life in SCHOOL being unproductive and largely wasting time and for what reasons? Because we have arbitary standards on when a kid should or should not know certain information?